strategies for optimising common lookups etc

Hi all, apologies if this is a dumb question - not really sure where to look
for this kind of stuff...

I have a frequently called stored procedure that needs to access some
"configuration" information to determine how it should behave.

Currently I have the configuration information in its own table, and the sp
does a lookup "select item from config where pk = ...".

I am wondering whether there is any way to "cache" the result of a lookup
across instances of the stored procedure call?  The configuration value will
rarely change, and as the procedure is called often it seems a bit of a waste
of resources looking it up each time the procedure is run.

Is this the sort of thing that internal variables would handle (by that I mean
using "set" and "show")?

TIA
Martin

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Martin Hart
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